With a dull, dead throb of syllables that virtually reaches out and grabs the auditor, Owens writes: "If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, / Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud/of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, / My friend, you would not tell with / such high zest / to children ardent for some desperate glory, / the old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est / Pro patria mori." (it is sweet and right to die for your country) Owens makes clear to the reader knows of which he speaks, because the poem was written, as its inscription states, that it was penned during the war itself on the front lines. Owens setting of the scene of the marching soldiers where "Many had lost their boots / but limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; / Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots / of tired, outstripped Five-Nines6that dropped behind," not only paints a tired picture of marching soldiers, but underlines the poor supplies of the men with very specific details such as the missing boots, as well as the specificity of "Five-Nines" that suggests that the poet knows the world and the conditions of which he speaks, as only a soldier would refer to shell explosions as "Five-Nines."

The poet uses this specificity of language for similar reasons as to Frost -- to set the scene and to verify the poet's knowledge and right to question the cliche at the heart of the poem, but Owens seems even more careful to show that he is a solider, than Frost is to show...

Owens does not use metaphors like Frost does, about imagining the stranger as like a savage of old, or dwell on common and natural details. Owens' specific place names and technical references are all unexplained, and are often details and names only a soldier would know and notice, in contrast to apples and pine as in Frost, which not only a farmer would be acquainted with. When metaphors or similes are used by Owen, they are brief, rather than extended and literary as in Frost: compare "coughing like hags" as opposed to the lengthy and fantastical description of how the neighbor seems as of woods and trees.
Like Frost's poem as well, Owens' poem is primarily a recorded observation of another, a stranger. But Owens' poem takes the form an observation, not a stilted conversation as in "Mending Wall." In "Dulce et Decorum est" the man dies before the poet's eyes, and rather than argue with the man, the end quote of the poem speaks for the man, who dies, choking, in a haze of gas the poet himself nearly inhaled. It is not sweet to die so, says Owen. And though spring mending time may come again, the dying man haunts Owens in his dreams, every night, suggesting that the poem is a perpetual recollection rather than a single incident.

Works Cited

Frost, Robert. "Mending Wall." 1915. http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/frost-mending.html

Owen, Wilfred. "Dulce et Decorum est." War Poetry. http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen1.html